Magoosh Comics: Fun With Idioms, Part 1

In my last post on this subject, I introduced you to the idea of idioms—words and phrases that are informal, and have a very different meaning than the one you’d normally find in a dictionary. I showed you certain idioms such as “raining cats and dogs,” which means “raining hard,” and “hot potato,” which means a subject or idea that makes people upset.

As I mentioned before, idioms are a lot of fun to learn and use. And while you won’t normally find idioms in a dictionary, Dennis Oliver has made a really wonderful dictionary of idioms over at ESLcafe.

In this post and my next few idiom-related posts, we’re going to have some fun with idioms. I’m going to show you some idioms, some idiom-related comic strips, and then have you do idiom activities. In each activity, you’ll try to guess the meaning of each underlined idiom in the comic strip, based on the context. Then you’ll check your guesses by looking up the idioms. All idioms can be looked up in Dennis Oliver’s dictionary, unless otherwise noted.

Here we go:

The idioms:

dream on

easy does it

eager beaver

keep your chin up

let sleeping dogs lie

other fish in the sea

until hell freezes over

The Magoosh Comic:

The activity:

Guess the meaning of the each underlined idiom in the comic strip. Then check your answers by looking up the meanings of the idioms. The meaning of “other fish in the sea” can be found here. And here is the definition of “keep your chin up”. All other idioms can be found in the ESLCafe idiom dictionary. You can look them up by the first letter of the first word in each idiom.

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About David Recine

David is a test prep expert at Magoosh. He has a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and a Masters in Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He has been teaching K-12, University, and adult education classes since 2007 and has worked with students from every continent. Currently, David lives in a small town in the American Upper Midwest. When he’s not teaching or writing, David studies Korean, plays with his son, and takes road trips to Minneapolis to get a taste of city life. Follow David on Google+ and Twitter!

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